Soul Slayer in the Core Root
by Marbletoast
Summary: A story whose concept was novel for me so I attempted to make it into a story. PG for general wierdness and some violence.
1. Default Chapter

Yea, this requires some beforehand commentary.  
  
This story is written in third and first person to get the right affect. Third is italics (marked by ~ at the beginning and end of the paragraph since I can't get it to save as HTML), first is normal.  
  
In most of my stories, I have made my ponies "anthro" so they can do useful things like hold stuff. So my characters walk on two legs.  
  
This story is a tiny morsel of the larger, sprawling, uncontrolled saga I've somehow created in my head. This one has a beginning and an end, fear not, and so I only need to explain a few things before you read this.  
  
Tyler can only communicate telepathically. He's a derkin, and all of them are somewhat telepathic, and he is extremely powerful in the mind- manipulation area. Tyler doesn't hear voices but receives the input of the emotions behind the words and forms those into an untarnished meaning of what the person is saying. Appearence: silver, white mane and tail  
  
Mystic is a normal mortal guy who got sucked into a pretty abnormal life. I won't go into details, because it doesn't matter for this story, and I'd hate to ruin the plot of other stories! Appearance: All black  
  
This story is set in the Sky Kingdom, an immortal kingdom of the Council—don't worry about it. It's not important to this story, either. 


	2. Soul Slayer One

They wanted me to find it. Some thing that was eating out his soul, some thing they could not find themselves. They asked me because I can hear words they do not speak, because I can understand the language of emotion, because I can manipulate the intangibles of thought. They were right to guess I could do more than I have shown them, but I do not know if they have over guessed themselves.  
  
~Tyler knelt by the bedside and stared hard. Mystic was very ill, but no physical eye could have known. Sleep mimics death. Mystic had not moved since they'd laid him there in the healing room of the Palace, and they had not dared touch him but left him to the dreams that trembled behind his eyelids. He was being hollowed, and before even Tyler thought to do anything he could not be roused. The derkin's gray fingers felt the shiver of Mystic's skin and as he stared hard, harder than a man who sees flesh, he felt the beating of Mystic's heart. Like fireflies Tyler watched Mystic's thoughts fluttering, incoherent and scattered, and followed them into the hollows of the mind. These paths were familiar and he knew he sought a darker place.~  
  
Often I had slipped into the recesses of the conscious, but rarely had I dared the unconscious. I can say I was nervous, but I would be more honest to say I was terrified. He had no coherent thought process. All I received were tangled smears of emotion on a canvas of numb unawareness. My worry over what would become of me once I pushed myself into the realm of his delirium was only outdone by my worry of what I could do to him. There are not many who recover from footprints on their memory.  
  
~They left him alone, to concentrate. Tyler was not easily distracted, but this was no ordinary task. He stared at Mystic, unnerved and shaking, and sat for a long morning letting himself settle. It was not a meditation, but nearly, as if he were breathing in the sky around him to focus solely on the skyless world beyond touch.~  
  
It is difficult to explain that first step from the physical to the abstract. There is no border, but suddenly I am seeing his unreality.  
  
Hanging darkness all around, so thick I could hardly see through it, and suddenly blue mist and shadows of memories. A mosaic of faces, numbers, colors, places, images, voices, and infinite other memories still readily conceivable. Things Mystic may have forgotten still waiting to be remembered, dreams and nightmares that branch like cobwebs from his store of mental memoirs, the touch of a thousand emotions. I am not looking for these.  
  
~He saw as if he were reliving Mystic's life. Flashes of memories rushed past him and he felt brief pangs of every feeling they evoked for Mystic, and yet Mystic was different from Tyler's experience because he remembered nothing in his state and those faces and emotions and events were stranded. Tyler moved swiftly through the forest of memory, past adulthood into the blurry fragments of childhood and finally the edges of what could consciously be recalled. The mind's eye rushed into the darkness of the subconscious. ~  
  
I had been that far only once before, and I will never forget what I found there. There is no way to hesitate when searching through the psyche and so I plunged into the cold darkness full of shapes and colors and sounds and smells I could never quite distinguish, nor did I hear, smell, feel or see as I would have with my natural senses. Voices older than Mystic's existence spoke continuously and I felt them echoing in the chords of my own self. I moved as quickly as I could—whatever I was searching for had no power there, nor did I.  
  
~Tyler saw into the unchangeable nature of Mystic. There, in that shapeless shadow, lay the pieces of Mystic neither he nor his experience had any part in creating. Here was the very essence of who he was, the basis for all his fears, the roots of his joy, the intangibles that shaped the life he remembered and how he remembered it. Still it was silent like no physical silence–no thub of heart or stirring of lungs, not beat of eyelids or rustle of skin. Only trailing wisps of unimagined instincts, the colors of existence. A deeper memory, one he did not live. Those places Mystic never touched but they were still dusty with the light of his memory. There were still deeper places.~  
  
Past the darkness I could only hear and smell, I was standing in darkness I could see and cold I could feel. After moving intangibly and feeling the pressing of abstractions, the weightlessness of empty air is bizarre and to breathe it in is like drinking the sky. In truth, I could see nothing, for I was looking with real eyes into a blind blackness. I was walking into the intangible, standing suddenly in a dark corridor of his mind. Stone cold and wet, this place had lain dormant since his birth. I could smell and touch where before I brushed shadows. I could feel the closeness of heavy stone walls, however, and I guessed I somehow had come to a hall in the heart of Mystic's self.  
  
~Tyler was standing in a hallway made of stone. He felt the cold floor as he had never felt life. The damp feel was real and he shivered. He was a body, physically inside Mystic's core being, standing in a path beyond imagination. He could see nothing for the blackness, but he hardly needed to. No longer did he need to strive to go further. He was as far as he could go.~  
  
There was more to see, I soon learned, than blackness. A bobbing light, a flame, a torch, a hand, a face. A face was staring at me, holding his torch, a face with empty eyes. Curious, he held the torch closer to me, as if he can see through those hollow sockets.  
  
It was Mystic's face. 


	3. Soul Slayer Two

~Tyler knew him for who he was. His eye sockets were empty and black, but he did not need eyes. The eyes are gateways to the soul and this was the soul who saw through Mystic's eyes. He looked curiously at Tyler, holding the torch close enough to reveal Tyler to himself. He was dressed not in his cobalt silk but in a black cloak and boots.~  
  
"At last."  
  
I heard him speak and shivered once all over for it; I was not feeling him speak, understanding the emotions that triggered speech. My ears were ringing with the sound, the real sound, of his voice, and he was speaking to me.  
  
"I have waited a long time, in the dark."  
  
"For what?"  
  
I shuddered harder at my own voice. I felt it tickle my throat, come up over my tongue and through my teeth and echo in the vast emptiness of the hall, and I was speaking to him. He seemed, at first, to be a surprised as I.  
  
"For you, I suppose. Come with me."  
  
I followed him when he turned, as desperate to remain in the halo of light as anything. When he spoke, he did not sound like Mystic. Had it not been his face, I would have guessed another had found this place as I had, but he had always been here. He spoke differently, but in the same way he was a part of Mystic.  
  
~Tyler and Mystic walked slowly through the hall, and Tyler could never seen beyond one arm and shoulder and face of his guide, nor much more than his own chest and shoulders. They shared conversation, Tyler speaking as he never had and hearing as he never would again. It was there in the mind that his language as spoken and, therefore, his voice was heard. Mystic told him very little, though it took a very long time to say. Past the subconscious was the being, the dwelling place of the soul. He had never known anything beyond the halls, and they had always been lit. And then, slowly at first, they were darkened and his walks through the labyrinth of halls and corridors became narrower. Soon, the whole range of his reach was blackness and he was isolated to the Core Root.~  
  
I asked him what the Core Root was, and he never said anything. I felt it all around me, however, the pulsing of the air as if blood vessels strung the particles together. I could taste something like twilight and ginger, but very unlike both in its enormity and agelessness, and we standing in a room that spread out over me in a dome so high above out heads the torch's light only glinted across the rim. Mystic left me there and strode to the center of this room, and I saw a stone table come into view. On it I could see carvings of things I did not understand, but when I looked again they were not carvings, nor was the table stone. Mystic's torch rested in the center, held aloft by a tripod of intricate detailing, and just as his hand left the base the flame blossomed and spread to engulf then enormity of the space, and I could see him clearly for the first time.  
  
"There is very little left anymore."  
  
~His face and hand were, perhaps, all that really was left. Tyler could see his other arm now, or at least the shadow of where it had been. All across the black chest he could see raw openings leading into a blackness that was nothing. No ribs, no throbbing heart, just space that did not lead to his other side. Even his neck was decaying, peeling away to reveal that same blackness. Under his cloak, Tyler could not see more.~  
  
He was dying, as a soul dies. I saw him rotting away even as we stood there, and yet he paid his peeling flesh no mind. His was not the hurt; that was the body's. But his was the decay.  
  
"What is happening?"  
  
"Something is here, in these halls."  
  
I could not stop staring at the hollows in his chest, the emptiness of his robe, and he would not take the pressure of his eyeless sockets from my face.  
  
"What is it? Is it doing that to you?"  
  
~Mystic glanced down when Tyler pointed and ran a hand across his fragmented chest. His fingers left a ripple in the blackness which faded away and back into the black nothing inside him. ~  
  
"Yes. I can not tell what it is, but it is always here. It is here now, still feasting."  
  
I could see what he spoke of. Slowly, very slowly, pieces of black skin were falling away–no, in fact, merely dissolving–to reveal more emptiness.  
  
"Can I help you?"  
  
"That is why you are here."  
  
~He moved again to the torch and lifted it, dimming its light nearly back to the confined halo of before but leaving enough to let Tyler see the floor he stood on, though the great domed ceiling fell away again into blackness.~  
  
"It is weak in the light, and will not come too near. If I am in the darkness..."  
  
He stopped speaking and I almost saw a wild terror flash through eyes that did not exist.  
  
"I have no power over it. That is what became of me here–"  
  
~Tyler saw the robe lift where an arm would have been, but saw only slivers of black skin and fingers, a crease in the air at the elbow, and a few shrinking patches by the shoulder. ~  
  
"When the lights were going out. I have kept this burning since. Follow me."  
  
He led me through the round room and I watched the torch light skip across the stone walls. There were carvings, just like on the table, that looked less like carvings than they did creases in flesh. Though nothing but the flame and ourselves moved, I could not help but think the room—the very walls—felt very much alive. I could understand nothing on the walls, though occasionally I thought I saw a letter I recognized stand out of its shadow, but when I looked it had melted into the twisting grooves that snaked like foliage across the wall.  
  
"What do they say?"  
  
~Mystic stopped waking and turned to the wall, holding his torch closer to the stone. ~  
  
"They tell of him, and his self, and they are always changing because he is, also. Now they are...they are lost, and do not know what to say."  
  
His voice darkened the torch to a smouldering pile and just as suddenly I felt something in the swell of darkness, breathing. I saw his face tilt upward to look just behind my ears, and the torch flared again.  
  
"What was that?"  
  
~Mystic still stared behind Tyler, his face never changing.~  
  
"That was the hunter. Come quickly."  
  
We walked faster then, and I did not ask another question. I thought, or imagined, that I could hear a subtle scrapping just behind us, or leagues away, or inside the beating of my own heart—but always, always coming. I wondered what I could possibly do, what good I was, but then I thought—there is no one else.  
  
~The halls Mystic led Tyler down were much the same as the hall in which Tyler had first found himself. It wound in great arches, seeming to curve around back in itself in places, twisting like a living serpent. Mystic's stride spoke of confidence, told Tyler he knew these passageways even without eyes, and so the derkin followed, one silver ear always titled back to listen for a pursuer. At last Mystic stopped walking and held the torch aloft. Tyler could see an arched entryway, but behind that a blackness that rang with immense space and smelled like stagnant water. Mystic sighed and the light burst open and spread, leaving Tyler's tongue numb.~  
  
Before me was not a room. It could not have been a room, and yet there were walls, great, steep walls that fell sheer and treacherous into a sea. That sea rolled away from us into shadow, waves moving with a current that could not have existed, slapping against the walls. We stood above them, in a doorway that was part of one terrible wall. From our feet fell a stairway, but it was utterly useless. Many of the stairs were missing—not fallen, but merely missing like the pieces of Mystic's chest and arm—and more still were fading away, and they led directly into the sea. Above us was, perhaps, some kind of ceiling. When I looked, I almost thought I saw the glisten of—what was it? Stars. And yet I felt enclosed, despite the enormity, and I felt as if I was standing at the threshold of some surreal cathedral.  
  
"This is how it is. The sea comes closer all the time. Slowly. The tide is rising slowly, but is always rising. Many, many rooms are gone, many halls are filled."  
  
"What can I do?"  
  
"If all the halls are filled, if all the rooms are washed away, I will drown and wash away with them. You must find the hunter."  
  
~The waves made a hollow crashing roar that echoed through the expanse of the massive room, booming off pillars and slowly rotting away the living stone.~  
  
"And then you must stop the slaughter."  
  
~Tyler looked at his hands, as if suddenly remembering they were there. His fingers looked just as they had before, the creases of age and the weathered blisters not diminished even while he stood in the absence of time. They looked just as they must on his body beyond sight, back beyond Mystic's memory.~  
  
"Tell me what I must do."  
  
"You must find the Core Root."  
  
"Is this not it? Was that room there not the Core?"  
  
~Mystic's brows creased and the shadows in his sockets deepened.~  
  
"That was not the Core Root. It has chased me from the Core, and it sleeps there. I have forgotten where it is. You must find it."  
  
"Can I kill it?"  
  
"It is not alive."  
  
"How can I stop it?"  
  
He was staring at me again, staring without expression, staring deeper than any eyes can look. Something was coming closer, something was coming, something I did not understand. He was asking me to rid the halls of Mystic's being of some evil, some evil that was no one but some thing that hid in a place even his soul could not remember. I wanted very much to run, to follow my trail back out of this dank, unreal place and leave Mystic to his terminal slumber.  
  
"I do not know."  
  
~Tyler did not run, did not move, but stared at the rolling black water. ~  
  
"How long do I have?"  
  
"There is no time here."  
  
"Mystic is dying."  
  
"You have until the rooms and halls are filled, until my flesh is nothing but shadow, until I forget what I am. Go quickly. Take this light."  
  
He handed me his torch, his only defense against the surrounding terror.  
  
"I can't take this."  
  
"You must."  
  
~Tyler stared baffled at Mystic.~  
  
"Once you have taken the light, your time will begin to run out."  
  
I took his torch and saw him last like a ghost on the sea, and he was gone behind me in the hollow black, the same that yawned shapeless before me. Even before the light had caught the stone edges of another hall entrance, I felt something swell up in the dark and fill the emptiness. Stale, stagnant air moved across me in a warm breath, and I heard him.  
  
"Now!" 


	4. Soul Slayer Three

~A heartbeat and a glance away, Tyler's blue eyes stared unblinking beyond what those who stood around him could see. Tajmere watched them both, the man in the bed and man seated beside him, with worry lacing the unmoving gold of her eyes. She said nothing, not when Merlynn stood with her, not when Saudi stared from the doorway, not even when Palen's tears fell at her feet.  
  
"I should not have asked him." One pale morning hand reached to touch Tyler rough robe but pulled away quickly. "What have I done?"  
  
"He would have gone," Tajmere said at last, "whether you had asked him or no. His guilt drives him."  
  
"What is happening?" The voice was Lien's at the doorway, and Palen shook his head slowly and Mystic took a long, ragged breath. ~  
  
The hall was long and wet. I could both feel and hear the water trickling around me and onto my shoulders, cold and heavy. The torch could barely light the close walls so thick was the age of the place. Mystic was not thirty years old, but that place felt older and sadder than the sky, as if it had waited for an eternity for something that never came. My footsteps rang dull and did not echo and the walls were smooth and bare but for the dark stains of water.  
  
It seemed just as long I walked straight, neither on incline or decline, the hall always rolling out before my light and curling up again behind me. After thousands of heartbeats and perhaps a lifetime or two another darkness sprang at my side and I held the torch against a larger entrance way. This one was peaked at the arch and studded in musty gems whose color could no longer be distinguished. I hesitated long under that arch, pushing the light as far as I could without moving my feet and seeing only cobbled floor and smooth walls fading into dark. Something smelled salty and rich and the path lead somewhat down from where I stood. I would have moved on, afraid of descending into darkness, when a breeze licked my ears and reminded me of things I had felt so long ago in the world, away from the windless inside. I hesitated no longer but followed the zephyr that played through the stagnant air.  
  
~Tyler saw as soon as he entered the hall that those walls were different, ornately carved and perhaps, though it was hard to tell in the damp color and the flickering light, gilded in faded gold. The carvings were deep and strange, more like stone constellations that wove with their own life, unmoving and yet always changing, through the grain of the walls. His light found their crevices and enhanced their shadow until he felt himself crawl inside them and walk through their maze of twisted meanings and forgotten words, if words they were at all. Like firebrand they seemed to sear themselves to his eyes until he could see each one laid delicate in the darkness before him before it glinted out in the blaze of the torch.~  
  
I could not tell how far I had come or if I was making any progress at all. My legs and lungs were not sore for wandering in the intangible does not weary muscle. I had rounded one corner, cautiously, with the torch before me, but otherwise the hall had cloven straight through the stone it had been carved from. I considered stopping, perhaps turning back, when panic shot through my spine. For a moment I froze and stared with fear into the dark around me, but it had not been my own panic. Something desperate had happened, something terrible, behind me in the labyrinth I had walked through. I was running out of time.  
  
~They had moved him to a bed for lack of knowing anything better to do. He lay as still as death, stiller than Mystic, stiller than stone. His eyes were open and alone moved, following some pathway none of them could imagine. He could neither hear them nor feel their hands, for he made no recognition of voice or touch.  
  
"What do you think he found?" Feyl asked Palen, but received no response. "It has been days. Surely–"  
  
"He will come back to us when his work is complete. Or–" There Palen paused. "We will lose them both."~  
  
I was running down the corridor, the feeling of terror driving my blood through me like lightning. I thought of Mystic in the dark and the hot breath that curled around the corners of the room, that heavy presence I could not see. It was while I was running my boots were suddenly soaked and I felt water splash up against my legs as I ran. Before I could stop, I was knee deep in water so cold I felt it in my teeth, water that curled around my knees and broke behind me against the stone path I had been following. My torch showed nothing but more water and more darkness and the tiny waves glinted orange under the light. I could smell vast space and emptiness and the small breeze had swelled to a chill in the air that touched my bones, but there seemed no way for me to cross the water.  
  
~Tyler backed out of the dark ocean slowly, his eyes following the imagined horizon before him. His only solution seemed to be returning and searching a different way. He felt time crawling over him like flies and something beyond the water held him in place, his boots lapped by the water. As he stared and thought, he felt the waves brush shyly against his legs, nearly to his knees with each splash. With a new urgency he backed up the stone hall as the ripples and waves came ever closer, ever larger. Something besides the air was stirring.~  
  
I could see nothing but the arcs of water in my torch light, but the air was suddenly warmer, though not pleasantly so. Whatever was under the surface of that sea was moving, churning the surface, perhaps coming closer. I would have run again, eager to be away from the dark mystery and rising terror, but suddenly the whole cavern was clammy with breath and blacker than pitch, as if someone had snapped close a door on my sight. Only my torch, now small and smoldering, gave of any kind of light and that was thin and shivering, as afraid of the darkness as me. I heard the water break and felt the wind hot with foul air stir around me, and the fire caught a crimson glint before me.  
  
~Out of the cold, black water rose a storm of shadow and flesh Tyler's quavering torch could not fathom. With pulsing silence, it seemed at once to be the very walls of the cavern coiling into life and the water and air fighting in flesh. There was no sound but the rustle of water, but the smell of a final winter no spring could break froze his lungs. Tyler wanted to run. He had no sword, he had no hope. He had only the flame, and that he thrust toward the throbbing darkness and felt his voice clot in his throat. The torch light was caught in the blackness before him like two oceans of fire as two eyes burst into life before the light. Tyler saw them wink and shudder as they swallowed and reflected the torch light as if each had a heart of fire. All around those ebony orbs began a breathing, first like a low hiss that slithered over the water and around Tyler's ankles, rising to an audible growl that rolled from the water and the walls. The eyes blinked.~  
  
I knew the hunter. I felt the hatred for the fire in his coils down under the water, fathoms further than imagination. I could feel him under my feet, breathing. I could feel him in the walls and in my own lungs. He was larger than the sea he moved in, larger than the space he filled. He was not inside Mystic's core; he was coiled around it and inside it all at once. I had not found him. He had found me. But he would not move toward the flame. "I command thee!" I found myself shouting, though my voice was swallowed in his size. "Leave these halls, or I shall force thee from them."  
  
~Whether the hiss that licked the edges of his words was laughter or anger, Tyler couldn't tell, but it was followed by a voice of smoke and steel. ~  
  
"You come to fight, mortal. You come to fight me in my own halls. You come to find, to find, to find. You found, you found. Now follow!" The water surged around me when he broke his stare suddenly and lunged away, diving back into his watery fortress and nearly drowning me in a wave a blood cold water. In a wild fear I fled the water, holding the torch above me, but whether it was my own speed that kept the flame alive or some power still clinging to Mystic's last refuge, I cannot tell. I still had my weapon, but I was suddenly without an enemy.  
  
~Before Tyler lay a mirror still black surface and only the lingering taste of the hunter's voice.~ 


End file.
